Articoli/Articles
CORRADO GINI AND THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS OF FASCIST RACISM
DANIELE MACUGLIA
Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, The University of Chicago, 1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA
SUMMARY
It is controversial whether the development of Fascist racism was influenced by earlier Italian eugenic research. Before the First International Eugenics Congress held in London in 1912, Italian eugenics was not characterized by a clear program of scientific research. With the advent of Fascism, however, the equality “number = strength” became the foundation of its program. This idea, according to which the improvement of a nation relies on the amplitude of its population, was conceived by statistician Corrado Gini (1884-1965) already in 1912. Focusing on the problem of the degeneration of the Italian race, Gini had a tremendous influence on Benito Mussolini’s (1883-1945) political campaign, and shaped Italian social sciences for almost two decades. He was also a committed racist, as documented by a series of indisputable statements from the primary literature. All these findings place Gini in a linking position among early Italian eugenics, Fascism and official state racism.
The current historiography of the Fascist regime has frequently fo-cused on the sudden imposition by Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) in 1938 of the Manifesto degli Scienziati Razzisti (also known as the Manifesto della Razza), the document that gave official birth to Fascist racism as a state institution1. Many authors have underlined
Razza to the previous Italian cultural tradition, in which an
expli-cit, well-defined and institutionalized racist ideology was until that time substantially absent2. Within this framework, there is a diffused
idea among contemporary scholars that the official introduction of Fascist racism was an artificial construct, which Mussolini was for-ced “to import from the outside” due to the necessity of agreeing with the model imposed by the German ally.3 According to Renzo
De Felice, Mussolini failed in his first attempt, in 1937, to introduce a specific anti-Semitic policy, and opted for a more general racist ideology, clearly detailed in the Manifesto della Razza, which im-plied an anti-Jewish policy as a particular case of the more general racist ideology4.
Racism had the advantage of being more impersonal and totalitarian [than anti-Semitism], concerning the Jewish people in an indirect way, in a much larger context, of presenting itself in an apparently more scientific character5.
Mussolini’s intention, however, was to incorporate Germany’s raci-sm into the Fascist ideology, to properly readjust it so as to avoid the embarrassing circumstance of having Mediterranean people consi-dered inferior racial types than German ones, and to find a substan-tial agreement with the Catholic Church, which opposed the cruel means intended by the Nazi hierarchies. From these modifications stemmed the idea of the Roman-italic race6, and the milder version
of the Italians’ racist ideology when compared to the Nazis.7 A
dif-ferent historical trend, on the other hand, has supported the idea that the Manifesto della Razza was not exactly extraneous to the previous Italian cultural tradition, and that some literary, political and religious actors had clearly instigated precise racist ideals from both the nationalistic and the Catholic frameworks8. This is the case
of the Italian politician Giovanni Preziosi (1881-1945), the priest and Church historian Umberto Benigni (1862-1934) and the Jesuit
circle operating around the Catholic journal Civilità Cattolica, au-thors, after the end of the Great War, of an aggressive anti-Semitic propaganda9. The same issue holds for those nationalistic groups
and avant-garde artists which, since the beginning of the twentieth century, had imbued the Jewish culture with racist connotations in-stigated by various trends in the arts and literature10.
Yet, despite the variety of views and abundant studies on the sudden introduction of Manifesto della Razza, which was mostly conside-red a political phenomenon interconnected with literary, philoso-phical and religious issues, it has long been assumed, as underlined also by Maiocchi11, that the Italian scientific tradition did very little,
or altogether nothing, to explicitly support or pave the way for the eventual introduction of official racial laws. Surprisingly, the stu-dy of a possible interaction between the Italian scientific tradition especially the one developed in the two decades before the intro-duction of the Manifesto della Razza and Fascist racism was not properly analyzed by the scholarly literature until the end of the 1990s12. The issue is currently the focus of fervid debates among
Italian and international scholars13 who, delving into the Italian
eu-genic framework before the rise of Mussolini in 1922, are trying to understand its unique and atypical traits when compared to the Anglo-Saxon matrix14. The case of the eugenic sciences, in
particu-lar thanks to their relevant connections to a variety of other fields of scientific expertise, such as the social, demographical, biological, statistical and political sciences has proven to be a well-suited per-spective from which to approach significant aspects of the historical controversy outlined at the beginning of this introduction15. It was
also through the eugenic sciences that Fascist politics found a way to proclaim what Emilio Gentile calls the “religious character” of the regime, which “propos[ed] not only to govern human beings but to regenerate them in order to create a new humanity. In this way, political revolution became total revolution, permeating all aspects
of human life and abolishing any distinction between the personal and the political”16. It should be clear, however, that Italian
euge-nics before the advent of Fascism was anything but “a homoge-nous movement, coherent with itself”17; it was instead a “multiform
archipelago” composed of many interconnected facets18. Likewise,
the introduction of the Manifesto della Razza was the result of an extremely complex and articulated debate that, despite Mussolini’s centralized control, involved a heterogeneous group of scientific, political and religious actors. Within this framework, it is very dif-ficult, if not impossible altogether, to draw any conclusive and ab-solute claim on the outlined problem when studying eugenics and state racism in their wholes, as two monolithic categories.
In this paper, I will argue that it is through the analyses of smaller parts of the problem, and by means of abundant comparative stu-dies, that a deeper and more mature view can be developed: special “filters” should be adopted to isolate specific topics in both cate-gories, and to check whether any form of logical continuity can be drawn between these topics in both eugenics and state racism. An example of such filters would be that of the demographic sciences a perspective from which to highlight the exclusively demographic aspects of the complex and multiform debates that characterized both the early eugenic tradition and the official introduction of state racism. From this perspective, we can analyze how a specific demo-graphic issue or a specific contribution made by a certain actor de-veloped within both categories, and whether any logical continuity can be drawn between these issues. In the following pages, I will fo-cus, through the filter of the demographical sciences, on what I will argue to be a significant thread connecting early eugenics to Italian state racism. The focus will be on the figure of the Italian demo-grapher, sociologist and statistician Corrado Gini (1884-1965) and on the way in which he approached the topic of degeneration the specific issue under investigation within both eugenic and Fascist
frameworks. Gini’s early work was probably influenced by previous contributions made at the turn of the twentieth century by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) on the measurement of inequalities in income and wealth in different countries, ideas that Gini used to develop a precise theoretical framework for approaching the different birth rates characterizing various social groups. It will be shown that the basic ideas Gini had already developed before the advent of Mussolini remained, despite some subsequent refinements, basical-ly the same throughout Gini’s scientific career. In addition to this, Gini was both a leading actor in the early eugenic tradition and an influential protagonist of the Fascist regime; moreover, he was also a declared racist, as is indisputably documented in many of his wor-ks. All these findings place him in a special linking position betwe-en early Italian eugbetwe-enics on one hand and Fascism and official state racism on the other, underlining what I will argue to be a significant connection between the Italian scientific tradition and the Fascist racial policy of 1938.
To set the argument within the proper framework, a short historical excursus must be undertaken. I will start by focusing on the way in which Francis Galton’s (1822-1911) ideas on eugenics were received in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, and how they in-teracted with contributions made by Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) to the field of anthropological criminology after the publication of
L’Uomo Delinquente (Criminal Man) in 1876. A better
comprehen-sion of the Galton-Lombroso interface, especially in connection to the idea of degeneration, highlights the considerable role played by Gini in influencing both early eugenic research and the ideological foundations of the Fascist regime. An analysis of the figure of Gini is thus an essential ingredient for approaching a study of the historio-graphical problem of to what extent Mussolini’s racist policies were rooted in Italy’s cultural and scientific traditions.
A Short Historical Excursus
In Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Francis Galton introduced for the first time the word “eugenics” into the social sciences19. He was looking for a
brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of pre-vailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had20. Galton’s ideas about the improvement of the most “suitable races” were the result of a long process of reconstructing the genealogies of people who had made important contributions to the development of humankind. His idea was that intellectual capabilities are conge-nital and hereditarily transmitted, and are only partly influenced by education and by the social environment in which we live. In 1904, he wrote that eugenics is “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that de-velop them to the utmost advantage21”. One year later, he proposed a
new definition, saying that, “Eugenics may be defined as the science which deals with those social agencies that influence, mentally or physically, the racial qualities of future generations22”. It’s
intere-sting to notice that the term “improve” disappears in the second de-finition, which seems to be broader in its scope, allowing for both a direct improvement of positive traits and also for the repression of the negative ones. Galton made a significant addition in 1908, when he stated that “The Science of Eugenics (pronounced with a soft g, as in the name of the Empress Eugénie and in the word Genesis) is based on Heredity23”. These three statements reveal the two cores of
eugenics: the intention to improve the human race by means of arti-ficially controlled agencies, and the entire enterprise’s foundation on the theory of heredity.
Connected to the notion of improving inborn qualities in a race was the problem of degeneration of genius: genius is fragile and sterile, and genial traits tend to regress towards the features of the average man if natural selection is not properly reinforced with an artificial eugenic selection24. According to Galton, there were two possible
ways to prevent an overall quality decrease in the population. The first was through eliminating the unwanted individuals, and the other was through propagation of the preferred ones.
Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied? Evi-dently the methods used in animal breeding were quite inappropriate to human society, but were there no gentler ways of obtaining the same end, it might be more slowly, but almost as surely? The answer to these questions was a deci-ded “Yes” and in this way I lighted on what is now known as Eugenics25. Two different social scenarios were then possible. In the first case a stop should be put to the “production of families of children likely to include degenerates”, by adapting various techniques including castration, sterilization and abortion26. If unsuitable marriages were
“banned socially, or even regarded with the unreasonable disfavor which some attach to cousin-marriages, very few would be made27”.
The second route was to influence the useful classes in the commu-nity toward contributing more than their proportion to the next gene-ration28. It should be noted, however, that in Galton’s original
con-ception, this second possibility was valued much more than the first one, and he was very explicit in stating this idea: “The possibility of improving the race of a nation depends on the power of increasing the productivity of the best stock. This is far more important than that of repressing the productivity of the worst29”. With these two ways of
influencing the development of humankind, two different types of eu-genics were slowly defined at the beginning of the twentieth century: on the one hand there was the so-called “positive eugenics”, which was directly aimed at the improvement of the genetic stock of a
popu-lation by acting on the birth increase of the desirable elements, and on the other side was “negative eugenics”, which prohibited undesirable individuals from reproducing, which in many instances entailed the organic destruction of “lives not worth living”30. During the
subse-quent decades the latter method gained the upper hand.
At the end of the nineteenth century, none of Galton’s books had been translated into Italian. Even if Galton was known on the Italian peninsula, his influence was not particularly significant until 1912, the year of the First International Eugenics Congress in London. This congress represented a seminal moment for the history of Italian eu-genic research: before that time, Italian eueu-genics was focused on debates surrounding the biological regeneration of the Italian nation but lacked a rigorous and well-defined program of scientific rese-arch31. After the meeting in London, however, eugenics went
throu-gh a rigorous process of organization and institutionalization32, and
the London Congress divided early Italian eugenics into two parts: a previous non-institutionalized fragment, and a new, institutionalized one. After 1912, ideas on eugenics started to circulate more widely on the Italian peninsula, becoming the focus of debates in confe-rences and in various journals dedicated to the topic33. Despite this
development, however, Italy would potentially have been ready to receive and diffuse Galton’s ideas even before the London Congress, due to Lombroso’s previous contributions to the establishment of the theory of anthropological criminology. Lombroso’s concepts reso-nated strongly within Italian culture, and they were closely related to Galton’s perspective. Both authors, for example, focused on ge-nius and degeneration, ideas which would be the starting point for Corrado Gini’s subsequent approach to connected issues.
On a winter day in 1870, Lombroso was conducting research on Italian criminals. Being at that time professor of psychiatry, nervous pathology, and anthropology at the University of Pavia34, he was
and once for arson35. The name of this man was Giuseppe Villella
(1803-1872), a peasant from Motta Santa Lucia (Catanzaro, Italy) who was imprisoned, and died, in Pavia. The anatomical analysis of Villella’s cranium revealed an anomaly “on the occipital part, exactly on the spot where a spine is found in the normal skull36”. This was
a distinct depression that Lombroso named median occipital fossa
because of its situation precisely in the middle of the occiput, as in inferior animals, especially rodents. This depression, as in the case of animals, was correlated to the hypertrophy of the vermis, known in birds as the middle cerebellum37.
The observation of this anomaly in Villella’s cranium was a revelation for Lombroso. “At the sight of that skull,” he writes, “I seemed to see, all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the pro-blem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the in-ferior animals38”. According to Lombroso, criminality, madness and
genius were all sides of the same condition: an expression of degene-ration, a sort of regression in the history of evolution39. Degeneration
affected criminals and mad people, who were considered “atavistic” types. These were individuals whose development had stopped at an early stage of human evolution, exemplifying the emergence of ance-stral components in the present day. As Lombroso put it,
The criminal is an atavistic being, a relic of a vanished race. This is by no means an uncommon occurrence in nature. Atavism, the reversion to a former state, is the first feeble indication of the reaction opposed by nature to the perturbing causes which seek to alter her delicate mechanism […] hunger, syphilis, trauma, and, still more frequently, morbid conditions inherited from insane, criminal, or diseased progenitors, or the abuse of nerve poisons, such as alcohol, tobacco, or morphine, cause various alte-rations, of which criminality that is, a return to the characteristics peculiar to primitive savages is in reality the least serious, because it represents a less advanced stage than other forms of cerebral alteration40.
Lombroso also supported the idea that genius is closely linked to degeneration: “Those who have never come into contact with men-tally deranged persons”, he said, “may deem it absurd to mention genius and insanity in the same breath, and still more absurd to seek to demonstrate the existence of flashes of inspiration in insane per-sons”41. Lombroso observed that men of genius were often affected
by myriad remarkable problems. In his view, nature had to balance a particular advanced faculty with the development of certain kinds of deviance, insanity or anti-social behaviors:
The prevalence of insanity in men of genius explained innumerable contra-dictions and mad traits in their lives and works, the true meaning of which had hitherto escaped biographers, who either ignored them altogether or covered reams of paper with vain attempts to represent them as inspirations or, at any rate, reasonable actions. It also explained the origin of some of the extraordinary errors committed by great men; for example, the absurdly contradictory actions of Cola di Rienzi, who, after making himself master of Rome when the city was in a state of chaos, restoring peace and order, reorganising the army and conceiving the vast idea of a united Italy, ended his patriotic mission with a series of extravagances worthy of a madhouse42. Galton, too, stressed in the second edition of his Hereditary Genius (1982): “The relation between genius in its technical sense (whatever its precise definition may be) and insanity”, he says, “has been much insisted upon by Lombroso and others, whose views of the closeness of the connection between the two are so pronounced, that it would hardly be surprising if one of their more enthusiastic followers were to remark that So-and-So cannot be a genius, because he has ne-ver been mad nor is there a single lunatic in his family”43. Talking
about genius and insanity, Galton also emphasized that “there is a large residuum of evidence which points to a painfully close relation between the two, and I must add that my own later observations have tended in the same direction44”. While Galton was particularly
of an eminent family, for Lombroso degeneration was conceived as the emergence of atavistic characteristics in both criminals and ge-niuses. Whereas Galton employed his eugenics as a possible way to counteract the effects of degeneration, Lombroso attributed an ir-reversible reversion to a former ancestral state. By employing the idea of atavism, Lombroso was able to give an account of the dege-neration of modern man and his reduction to ancestral components, explaining the emergence of the past in the present time by means of the figure of a deviated man and his social relations to categories denoting normality versus aberration45.
Circulation of social classes and colonial policies: Gini’s way to degeneration
In 1912, Corrado Gini published a book “I Fattori Demografici
dell’Evoluzione delle Nazioni” (The Demographical Factors of the Evolution of Nations) in which he attempted “to explain the growth
and decay of nations by variations in birth rates of different elements in their population”46. Gini found the causes of such variations in
“the degree of economic development reached in any given instan-ces47. His paper turned out to be a fundamental apparatus for
re-eva-luating the social role played by the lower classes and addressing, from a different perspective, the issue of social degeneration48. Gini
observed that the upper class the one composed of the wealthiest members of society is characterized by a less pronounced birth rate when compared to the lower social classes, a finding that he had alre-ady tried to explain in 1908 in his book Il Sesso dal Punto di Vista
Statistico (Sex from the Statistical Point of View):
If the stimulus to procreation has lost its intensity, that is due above all, I believe, to the diffuse economic well-being, the decreased physical activity, the broadening and accentuating of that complex of characteristics that we call civilization, the final limit of which is a beatific state, in which every desire is sated and every effort suppressed49.
In Gini’s perspective, environmental stimuli do play an important role in influencing the development of sex: the lifestyle and physical activity of the working class “command in the organism, and throu-gh it, in the germinal cells, a lively reaction, which is obstructed on the other [the higher one], by the opposite conditions of health and tranquility”50. This idea, which Gini conceived as a general
“biologi-cal law valid for all human societies” 51, was supported by a variety
of fields of scientific expertise according to which “the sexual fun-ctions are favored, in superior species, by a life of physical fatigue, and in inferior species manifest themselves in alternate generations, under the stimulus of unfavorable environmental conditions”52. The
most obvious consequence of this finding was that the lower classes were eventually destined to prevail over the higher ones, and since the latter were considered the carriers of those positive cultural and social features on which a nation can rely to improve and regenerate itself, the circulation of social classes propagated new fears about a possible degeneration of Italian society53. According to this scheme,
Gini believed that an effective social improvement depends on the composition of the lower classes, upon which he focused his atten-tion and which he did not consider entirely consisting of polluting elements. From a large variety of historical data, he in fact observed that excellent individuals, fully capable of constituting future elite classes, have emerged from time to time out of the lower social clas-ses. Genius and excellence are not exclusive features of the elite, but excellence can naturally ascend from the lower classes, which Gini conceived as capable of positively influencing social evolution and national perpetuation. This idea was based on what Gini considered to be the important role played by the cultural environment.
In a bad environment, a selected race will worsen, in spite of the most active selection; in a good environment, a race improves, even if subjected to reverse selection. This phenomenon has been ascertained for plants, and seems to hold true for all organisms, and, in particular, for man54.
In 1912, he also expressed the idea that it is improbable that a child born in the disadvantageous classes would always be more degenerate than a child belonging to the upper classes, assuming that the two were raised, from a hypothetical viewpoint, in the same cultural conditions:
Until it is shown that the children of the lower classes if they were brought up from conception in the same surroundings as the children of the higher classes would turn out inferior to these, it is not proven that by stimu-lating the reproductiveness of the higher classes, one would improve the race more than by leaving their place to be occupied by the children of the working-class55.
According to Gini, then, the imbalance in the birth rate between the higher and lower classes, the differential birth rate that he focused on, does not necessarily imply either social degeneration or an ob-struction to the achievement of a social evolution. “The great mass of population”, he explains in another article,
is composed by those people who we call the poor classes; from them, as if from an immense breeding ground, the elects originate, in relatively small numbers, either through personal merit or through force of circumstances56. In such a way, Gini ended up proposing a completely new approach to the idea of degeneration, one we find neither in Galton nor in Lombroso, a position that focuses the attention on the “average people”, those composing the majority of the population. Given the dimensions of the lower classes when compared to the much smaller social elite, the statistical sciences epitomized the right tool to approach class study and find new ways to improve the national population. In 1914, in his article “L’Uomo Medio” (“The Average Man”), Gini declared that:
The average man, and the average soldier, and the average child, and the average newborn, as they respond to the needs of the systematic average, also respond to the facts […] meaning, as all generalizations based on a statistical analysis can and must respond to the facts, that is, not in single cases, but in mass cases57.
This was the starting point for a prolific set of statistical studies that were destined to constitute the scientific foundation of the subse-quent pronatalist population policy initiated by the Fascist regime. Analyses of the causal relationships among the physical and intellec-tual capabilities of the offspring and the mother’s age, the month and the natural environment in which the conception had taken place, the time period of the breeding, and the temporal distances between subsequent births, were all examples of statistical investigations car-ried on by Gini in his eugenic enterprise58.
In addition to this, Gini also called attention to what he considered to be the real degeneration of the upper classes. While for Lombroso, geniuses were degenerate and atavistic, for Gini “the elite were not degenerate in themselves, but in the fact that their germ plasm was more evolved, and therefore would be the first to decay”59. Therefore,
it seemed to him easier to obtain concrete results by working on the improvement of the lower classes, for the reason that
artificially to stimulate the reproduction of the higher classes, and check that of the lower ones would be equivalent to trying to improve society by increasing the duration of the life of the old, and preventing new genera-tions from taking their place60.
The real risk of degeneration was, for Gini, due to excess emigration which Italian society was then suffering61, a process that, by
redu-cing the lower classes composed of poorer people in search of job opportunities abroad, would have eliminated from the national pool the “least differentiated”62 and “most reproductive”63 elements of the
nation, producing in so doing “a demographic and military senescen-ce at first, then economic senessenescen-censenescen-ce, from which it will be extremely difficult to re-emerge” 64.
It was indeed by means of the idea of national senescence that Gini generalized and extended his theory to the study of more general com-petition among nations. Already in 1912, he had showed that every
na-tion can be characterized by a specific age, allowing one to distinguish among young, mature and senescent nations according to their respec-tive birth rates. “It is a common custom to speak of young populations and of old populations; and we feel that in such a phrase there is more than a simple metaphor”65. Young populations are characterized by a
high tendency to proliferate, and by a pronounced necessity to expand in the attempt to find, mainly by means of wars and emigrations, a new position among the older nations, those marked by a less pronounced tendency to proliferate and characterized by an inevitable economic, political and military decline. In any event, the idea of degeneration was now extended to the notion of an entire nation. According to Gini, a high birth rate is the first symptom of a nation’s well-being, and it is the interest of the government to contravene any decrease in the na-tion’s proliferation capabilities:66 “Nations produce, at the beginning
of their civilization, stronger, more intelligent, and happier children; but these advantages are slowly lost with the progress of the nation”67.
Embracing a kind of a Darwinian approach to the survival of the fit-test, Gini claimed that younger nations do have the natural right to expand over the older ones, and that the latter are responsible for the development of wars because of their natural tendency to disallow the expansion of the younger ones.
After the end of the First World War, anxieties over a presumed qua-lity decrease in the population started to circulate with an alarming tone. The Great War represented a dreadful example of counter-se-lection: while eliminating the youngest and strongest elements of a nation those people who were directly involved in the world conflict war produced a multitude of wounded, exhausted, underfed, battered and ill persons68. During the Great War, University of Cagliari
stati-stician Franco Savorgnan (1879-1963) wrote:
The great majority [of war survivors] will be, without doubt, undermined by privations, venereal diseases and tuberculosis, or, in the best hypotheses will have brought home from the war a nervous system strongly prejudiced
by the ceaseless fire of the artillery. […] The dysgenic consequences of the war will have distant repercussions, which will weigh as a curse on the children of our children69.
The genetic heritage of the white populations involved in the con-flict was conceived as being endangered, and Italian eugenics began to focus nervously on various issues of national health and rege-neration, going through a pronounced institutionalization process. The Società Italiana di Genetica e Eugenetica (Italian Society for Genetics and Eugenics) was created in 1919 by Gini, Cesare Artom (1879-1934), and Ernesto Pestalozza (1860-1934), while the Società
Italiana per lo Studio delle Questioni Sessuali (Italian Society for the
Study of Sexual Questions) was initiated in 1921 thanks to the help of Aldo Mieli (1879-1950), and finally the Istituto di Previdenza e
Assistenza Sociale (Institute for Public Welfare and Assistance) was
created in 192270.
It should be clear, however, that the issue of national regeneration was not a new phenomenon at all. As Emilio Gentile writes, “the myth of national regeneration occupies a central place in Italian po-litical and cultural history, from the Risorgimento to fascism”71. In
addition to this, “the myth of national regeneration did not belong solely to nationalistic culture. It was also present, in various forms, in other political movements: in liberalism, democracy and sociali-sm”72. During the years that followed the First World War, though,
ideas about national regeneration underwent a massive institutiona-lization and were considerably affected and shaped by a heteroge-neous group of scientific, political, and religious actors.
Already known as a leading scientist in the Italian eugenic com-munity, Gini quickly assumed important positions inside the just established Fascist regime: his ideas were indeed particularly clo-se to what the regime would eventually impoclo-se as its main lines of eugenic research. University professor at the universities of
Cagliari (1910-1913), Padova (1913-1923) and Rome (from 1923 to his retirement)73, Gini was among the intellectuals who, in 1925,
signed the Manifesto degli Intellettuali Fascisti74, the official
do-cument that established the ideological foundations of Fascism. In 1926, he became president of the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (Central Statistical Institute, the so-called ISTAT), and founded and directed the academic journals Metron (from 1920 to his de-ath), La vita Economica Italiana (1926-1943), and Genus (from 1934 to his death) the official journal of the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems. Metron, in particular, gave Gini a considerable international reputation, especially after 1921, the year in which Sir Ronald A. Fisher (1890-1962) published in the journal his “On the Probable Error of a Coefficient of Correlation Deduced from a Small Sample”75. Gini was also the author of The Scientific Basis of Fascism (1927)76 and, in the years that followed,
he became so close to Mussolini that the two of them would meet for consultations twice a month77.
In 1929, the power of the ISTAT was strengthened by law, when it was “assigned the official task to designate a national representati-ve in international scientific meetings on statistical subjects: Gini’s scientific and academic authority was thus enhanced by the law”78.
This was the time when the ISTAT expanded in order “to fulfil the task of the agriculture and population census; the Institute also took part in the Rome Population Congress organized by Gini himself”79.
This gave Gini even more international visibility and, in the drama-tic years leading up to the Second World War, he was awarded nu-merous Italian and international honors including honorary degrees from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan (1932), the University of Geneva (1934), and Harvard University (1936), in addition to his appointment to the presidency of the International Sociological Institute in 1933 and his election as an honorary mem-ber of the International Statistical Institute in 1939.
By 1927, the massive statistical and demographic analyses conducted by Gini and other ISTAT statisticians constituted the scientific ground from which stemmed a robust pronatalist policy that gave rise to a new, centralized and standardized arrangement in Italian eugenic re-search. Summarized in the equality “number = strength”, the new orientation imposed by Mussolini was based on the assumption that the power and improvement of a nation is strictly connected to the abundance of its population a fact that marked a turning point from a qualitative to a quantitative character in Italian eugenics80. Despite its
almost exclusively political character, however, the pronatalist policy tacitly implied an alliance between the Fascist regime, who inaugura-ted it with Mussolini’s famous Ascension Day Speech in May 1927, and the Catholic Church’s sexual morals, reaffirmed in 1930 with the encyclical Casti Connubii81. It was indeed in the interest of both
par-ties to promote a strong increase in the national birth rate: the former would have relied on a bigger army and would have created a younger nation, the latter would have relied on a larger catholic community. “Strength in numbers”, stressed Mussolini when talking about the ne-cessity of increasing the Italian population in order to obtain a more powerful and strong nation82. “The most effective method to re-raise
the birth rate, or to contain the decrease”, wrote Gini in 1928,
is not to encourage the reproduction of small families and individuals who shun marriages, but rather that of those who have managed to remove every obstacle from their families that opposed their expansion and multi-plication, who have preserved the generative power of earlier times, intact. Keeping these families in the country by putting the brakes on emigra-tion, facilitating their natural tendency to reproduce by appealing to the sentiments and considerations that could entice them, executing, whenever necessary, their transplantation to regions that have strong needs for pro-lific elements, constitute the most effective measure83.
There was no constraint on newborns and any form of birth control was banned, something that the more canonical eugenicists would
have considered absolutely crucial to guarantee healthy social deve-lopment. “If a social class or a nation would take this initiative [that of birth control],” Gini stressed, “as a result it would become weaker than the other social classes or the other nations”84. The same idea
appears even more effectively rewritten a few years later:
When rationalistic practices take strong hold in a country, and the birth rate continues, for a certain period, to diminish, it is very difficult to arrest this descent. Individuals may subsist, but the nation, the race, is condem-ned: it will disappear, or at least lose its proper space in the world, to the benefit of those nations that, obeying instinct, still have the necessary vita-lity to maintain themselves and multiply85.
It was not however just a matter of quantity: as Gini’s statistical analyses demonstrated, the middle class was capable of contributing to a possible improvement of Italian society and it was therefore in the interest of the regime to maximize the Italian population so as to increase the probability of producing excellence and enhancing the overall national quality. As Gini would eventually declare on the occa-sion of the Third International Congress of Eugenics held in New York in 1932, quantity and quality were strictly connected to each other in a way which made populations resemble a sort of biological organism:
The interest taken by eugenicists of many countries in the recent Interna-tional Population Congress of Rome, and the official participation at this New York Congress of the Italian Committee for the study of Population Pro-blems, afford, I believe, a further recognition of the truth that in the matter of population, as in other fields, the problems of quantity and quality are indissolubly connected. As I see it, they are indissolubly connected not only because in practice it is difficult to think of a measure affecting the number of inhabitants which does not also affect their qualitative distribution, or of a measure hindering or encouraging the reproduction of certain catego-ries of people which does not also modify, directly or indirectly, the number of the population; but also, and above all, because population is a biolo-gical whole, subject, as such, to biolobiolo-gical laws which show us that mass,
structure, metabolism, psychic phenomena, the reproduction of organic life are all indissolubly connected, both in their static conditions and in their evolution, so that it would be vain to try to modify some of these characters without taking into account the stage of development attained by the others86. The Fascist’s massive pronatalist population policy was neverthe-less beset by a series of remarkable problems, opening Gini up to a series of attacks. First and foremost, it was supposed that the more a society grows, the less rich, on average, the population will have turned out to be. According to the Ginian school, however, popu-lations develop first through a quantitative expansion, and then through a qualitative one, and per-capita richness would have been a later issue, to optimize in a subsequent stage87. In any event, the
idea of a less rich population was seen by Gini as a positive trait, inasmuch as it is with material difficulties that a nation can temper its strength and character88. In the same way, unemployment was
conceived as a problematic aspect of a growing society. On the other hand, Gini thought that there was no causal connection between the increase of population and an increase in unemployment: in 1928, with the publication of “Disoccupazione e Sovrappopolazione” (“Unemployment and Overpopulation”), he showed that the real va-lue of a salary is not dependent solely on the economic laws of sup-ply and demand, but depends on the fact that, due to the actions of trade-unions, salaries exhibit a dangerous “inertia”89 which threatens
their quick adjustment to the increasing needs of industry, creating a series of remarkable problems connected to employment. Last but not least was the problem of the primary resources needed to satisfy the demanding necessities of a growing society, shortages deemed solvable by means of an adequate colonial policy:
Colonization has to be conceived as a part of that natural mechanism of regulation by means of which nature helps civilization to be transmitted from those populations which are at the top of their development to those which are more backward90.
Although the Italian situation was considered adequate from the point of view of its birth rate, the cases of France and England looked much more problematic, allowing for their respective consideration as older nations. The French case was considered particularly dramatic, as a declining birth rate that lasted since the latter half of the 19th century
proved a significant factor in the loss of French prestige and power in comparison to the British neighbor91. From this perspective, Italy, being
younger than these countries, was justified, in Gini’s consideration, to prevail over them in its colonial expansion. The real problem was that of justifying Italian colonization of Ethiopia when, at least from the point of view of the age of the nation itself, Ethiopia was anything but older than Italy. Did Italy have any right to prevail over this country? Within this context, and supported by the scientific basis provided by his theory of national senescence, racist considerations started to be-come important to Gini’s outlook. Making similar assertions to tho-se of Italian anthropologist and explorer Lidio Cipriani (1892-1962), Gini said, “negroes do not give the confidence to be able to ever civi-lize themselves in the same way we do, and therefore they will never understand how much there is to do to exploit the immense natural re-sources of their land to the advantage of the entire humankind. Given such a condition, it is not fair that such natural resources remains unu-tilized, and civilized nations have the right to take possession of Africa just only for such resources”92. Similarly, ideas about the superiority of
the Italian race started to be scientifically and politically employed in Gini’s reasoning. Making use of his theory of the cyclical rise and fall of populations, he supported the idea that superior races would always have the right to prevail over inferior ones in the case of nations ha-ving the same demographical age, as indeed the case of Ethiopia.
Until there will be in this world populations that develop in terms of num-bers, culture, military strength, economic power, political prestige, and populations that decline, or populations that develop more or less quic-kly, or populations that decline more or less quicquic-kly, periodical territorial
redistributions will be inevitable. A perpetual status quo is an absurd idea. […] There are only two possible solutions: either the populations that decline or those that develop more slowly adequately and opportunely make concessions to those populations that develop more quickly; or, on the other hand, the latter try and on the average they normally succeed to find their way by themselves93.
These considerations were not extraneous to Gini’s work, even early in his career, as clear traces of them can be found in many of his re-presentative speeches and written works. In 1911 Gini had already presented his opinions about the inferiority of the Slavic race in a me-eting of the Minerva Society a prestigious literary institution founded in Trieste in 1810 to promote the study of Italian history and the cul-ture of the city. Speaking of the Italians, Gini wondered why “a race rich in intelligence, wealthy, nourished on noble traditions, animated by high ideals” should not prevail over “another race [the Slavic one], intellectually more limited, economically poorer, from whom the glo-ries of the past cannot be a prod for gloglo-ries in the future”94. Being one
of the very first examples of Gini’s racist positions, these words could be interpreted as a nationalistic attempt to reassure the irredentist pe-ople of Trieste, who feared the “negative influence” of their Slavic neighbors. But we can also find hints of a more general ideology, not limited to debates about the irredentist nature of north-eastern Italy. In 1914, in L’Uomo Medio, Gini explicitly admitted his convictions about the superiority of whole European civilizations when compared to other populations and cultures scattered around the globe: “The fact that all the populations who have come into contact with European civilizations”, he says, “have, sooner or later completely abandoned their national costume, to adopt our monotonous clothing, is further proof of the influence that the imitation of a superior race exercises on the formation of the aesthetic ideals”95. He also expressed disgust
for what he considered to be other “lower races”, as he outlined in the same publication: “What is there more repugnant to us than the long
pug nose of the Negroes or the Australians, and more distant from the long straight nose of the Anglo-Saxons?” he asked. “Therefore”, he continued, “when the English disembarked in Australia, the indi-genous there derided them for their sparrow-hawk noses. And what is uglier than their swollen lips96”? Even Asian populations were the
object of his attention, as he stated, “What is said can be repeated for the eyes: eyes which to us seem swine-like appear wonderful to oriental populations, and their natural length industriously lengthe-ned still more with paint is disgusting for us” 97.
Fig. 1. Subdued African people greet Italian soldiers, in La Domenica del Corriere, Decem-ber 27, 1936.
In 1919, in a letter to Leonard Darwin (1850-1943), Gini furthermore exemplified some of the most worrisome issues connected to interra-cial marriage, which, at that time, were the focus of fervid debates:
At the victorious end of the world war, the allied powers find themselves in increased contact with the African world. It would therefore be oppor-tune if the various eugenic societies aimed to gain legislative orders from the governments of the various nations, where such laws do not alre-ady exist, banning marriages between Europeans and the African races, allowing only those with Mediterraneans (Berbers, Egyptians) and with non-colored Arabs. Such bans must be extended to marriages with all those population groups of mixed blood scattered throughout the Afri-can continent. The scope of the proposal is to impede the growth of a European-African mixed-blood race, which, from various points of view, is undesirable98.
The same racist positions persisted in Gini’s career over the long term and, in Chicago in 1929, he explained why the interracial mar-riage between “whites” and “negroes” was particularly undesira-ble: mulattos did not present any of those “manifestations of gre-ater strength, precocity or vital resistance which characterize many hybrids in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and also […] cer-tain human hybrids99”. Yet, they “present a higher percentage than
Negroes of individuals who are unsuccessful at intelligence tests”100,
while at the same time “they do not present an equal or higher fre-quency than do the Whites of particularly gifted individuals”101.
It cannot be denied that mulattoes are generally intermediate between the Whites and the Negroes, consequently superior on the whole to the latter and inferior as regards most of the traits in which the Whites are superior; superior to the former and inferior to the latter in those few characters in which Negroes excel 102.
Despite his harsh position about the possibility for certain races to interbreed, Gini supported the idea that all races derive their origin from crossbreeding103. He believed that, in certain cases the
interra-cial marriage of certain “allowed races” rainterra-cial crosses can determine the rise of “populations endowed with superior characteristics”104.
This was indeed the case of some people of the Italian Renaissance, descendants of the mixtures between the “Mediterranean dolicho-cephalic and the Alpine brachydolicho-cephalic races”105. The problem of
interracial breeding involved complex debates in Fascist Italy106;
what is important to note here is that racism was not extraneous and politically detached from the earlier or more recent Italian eugenic traditions before the 1938 publication of the Manifesto della Razza, and that it is thus problematic to consider racist ideals as artificial constructs exclusively imported from the outside.
Conclusion
The historiographical problem outlined in the introduction to this paper concerns a possible relationship existing between early Italian eugenics and the formal introduction of state racism with the publi-cation of the Manifesto della Razza. Given the complexity of the to-pic, I decided to delve into a smaller part of the problem by using an imaginary filter to focus on exclusively demographical matters, and to isolate a set of selected contributions made to the Italian social sciences by Corrado Gini, a key figure of both the Italian eugenic tradition and the Fascist regime. These contributions to the idea of the differential birth rate and the theory of the competition among nations turned out to be particularly well-suited to shedding light on important aspects of my argument.
In the previous sections, I started off introducing the way in which the concept of degeneration was conceived by Galton and Lombroso before the institutionalization process that the Italian eugenic rese-arch went through after the London Congress in 1912. A study of the Galton-Lombroso interface highlighted the way in which the con-cept of degeneration had been substantially re-formulated by Gini during his scientific career; he not only shifted the attention to the
quotidian people who made up the vast majority of the population— the lower and middle classes—but, through the ideas of senescence and differential birth rate, he extended the idea of degeneration to an entire nation and showed how it had to be scientifically concei-ved to help the Italian country find a new, stronger place amongst competition with other nations. Gini’s ideas were greatly and enthu-siastically accepted by the Fascist regime, which was looking for a scientific justification to support its pronatalist population policy and colonial programs. Gini, in fact, eventually used the idea of national
senescence to justify both the Italian colonial policy in prevailing over the older nations of France and England, and to set up a precise racist hierarchy to justify the right of the superior Italian race to take possession of the African countries.
It should be clear, however, that Gini’s scientific achievements are not limited to the examples reported and analyzed in this paper, the objective of which was not that of writing a cultural biography of this figure. An analysis of the contributions Gini made to the social sciences at large would make clear the wide range of activities and institutional appointments Gini was involved in and the impressive network of people he was connected to and debated with; in other words, the idea of a demographical filter was just a tool for keeping myself focused on a few relevant ideas, and not get lost in the myriad connections to other fields of scientific, political and religious exper-tise and related debates. The kind of evidence an analysis of the pri-mary sources has provided seems to be relevant enough to continue a series of historical investigations into Gini’s scientific enterprise as a whole and its connections to other figures who took part in the eugenic and Fascist debates.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTES
1. A leading contribution on this topic has been made by Emilio Gentile. On the origins of Italian fascism, the interested reader should read GENTILE E., Storia del Partito Fascista, 1919-1922: Movimento e Milizia. Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1989; GENTILE E., The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist
Italy. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 1996; GENTILE E., The Ori-gins of Fascist Ideology, 1918-1925. New York, Enigma Book, 2005. On
the genesis of the Manifesto della Razza, in particular, the reader is invi-ted to consider CASSATA F., ‘La Difesa della Razza’ Politica, Ideologia
e Immagine del Razzismo Fascista. Torino, Giulio Einaudi Editore 2008;
CAPRISTO A., L’Espulsione degli Ebrei dalle Accademie Italiane. Torino, Zamorani. 2002; GILETTE A., The Origins of the “Manifesto of the Racial
Scientists.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2001; 3: 305-323; GREGOR
J., The Search for Neofascism. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006; SERVI S., Building a Racial State: Images of the Jew in the Illustrated
Fascist Magazine La Difesa della Razza, 1938-1943. In: ZIMMERMAN J.
D. (ed.), Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rules, 1922-1945. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 114-157; STERNHELL Z., The Birth
of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution.
Prin-ceton, Princeton University Press, 1994.
2. MONTALENTI G., Il Concetto Biologico di Razza e la sua Applicazione
alla Specie Umana. In: AA.VV., Conseguenze Culturali delle Leggi Razziali in Italia. Roma 11 maggio 1989, Roma, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei,
1990, pp. 25-39; DE FELICE R., Storia degli Ebrei Italiani sotto il Fascismo. Torino, Einaudi. 1993, p. 220; MAIOCCHI R., Scienza Italiana e Razzismo
Fascista. Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1999, pp. 1-2.
3. MONTALENTI G., see note 2, pp. 25-39.
4. DE FELICE R., see note 2, p. 220; MAIOCCHI R., see note 2, p. 2. 5. DE FELICE R., see note 2, p. 220.
6. MOTTOLA J., Gente di Razza: Così Parlò Nicola Pende, Tutore della Stirpe
e Pupillo dei Gesuiti. Foggia, Bastogi Editrice Italiana, 2010.
7. MAIOCCHI R., see note 2, p. 2.
8. On this thesis the reader should consider FABRE G., Mussolini Razzista. Dal
Socialismo al Fascismo: la Formazione di un Antisemita. Milano, Garzanti.
2005; GARIN E., Fascismo, Antisemitismo e Cultura Italiana. In: AA.VV.,
Conseguenze Culturali delle Leggi Razziali in Italia. Roma, 11 maggio 1989.
Roma, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1990, pp. 9-24.
9. MAIOCCHI R., see note 2, p. 2. Detailed references offering a focus on the figure of Umberto Benigni are PICHETTO M. T., L’Antisemitismo di Mons.
Umberto Benigni e l’Accusa di Omicidio Rituale. In: Italia Judaica. Gli Ebrei nell’Italia Unita 1870-1945. Roma, Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato,
1993, pp. 431-444; POULAT É., Catholicisme, Démocratie et Socialisme,
Le Mouvement Catholique de Mgr Benigni de la Naissance du Socialisme à la Victoire du Fascisme. Paris, Casterman, 1977. On the figure of Giovanni
Preziosi the reader should take into account CANOSA R., Mussolini,
Pre-ziosi e l’Antisemitismo Fascista. Milano, Mondadori, 2006; DE FELICE R., Giovanni Preziosi e le Origini del Fascismo (1917-1931). Rivista Storica del
Socialismo 1962; 17: 493-555.
10. MAIOCCHI R., note 2, p. 188. See also GENTILE E., The Myth of National
M., ANTLIFF M., Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 25-45.
11. MAIOCCHI R., see note 2, p. 2.
12. ISRAEL G., NASTASI P., Scienza e Razza nell’Italia Fascista. Bologna, Il Mulino. 1998; MAIOCCHI R., note 2, pp. 2-3.; VENTURA A., L’Università
dalle Leggi Razziali alla Resistenza. Padova, CLUEP. 1996; VIVANTI C., Storia d’Italia. Annali 11. Gli Ebrei in Italia. Torino, Einaudi. 1997.
13. CASSATA F., Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and
Gene-tics in Twentieth-Century Italy. Budapest, Central European University Press.
2011, pp. 223-227; ISRAEL G., Politica della Razza e Persecuzione Antiebrei
nella Comunità Scientifica Italiana. In: La Legislazione Antiebraica in Ita-lia e in Europa, Atti del Convegno nel Cinquantenario delle Leggi Razziali,
Roma, 17-18 ottobre 1988. Roma, Camera dei Deputati, 1989; MAIOCCHI R., see note 2, pp. 1-6; MONTALENTI G., see note 2, pp. 25-39; TOSCANO M., L’Antisemitismo nell’Italia Contemporanea: Note, Ipotesi e Problemi di
Ricerca. Zakhor, Rivista di Storia degli Ebrei d’Italia 2003; 6: 22-34.
14. MANTOVANI C., Rigenerare la Società. L’Eugenetica in Italia dalle
Ori-gini Ottocentesche agli Anni Trenta. Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 2004;
QUINE M. S., Racial “Sterility” and “Hyperfecundity” in Fascist Italy: The
Biological Politics of Sex and Reproduction. Fascism 2012; 1: 92-144.
15. CASSATA F., see note 13, pp. 1-8. 16. GENTILE E., see note 10, p. 27. 17. CASSATA F., see note 13, pp. 2-3.
18. WEINGART P., Science and Political Culture: Eugenics in Comparative
Perspective. Scandinavian Journal of History 1999; 24: 163-177; CASSATA
F., note 13, p. 2.
19. For the purpose of this study, please consider CASSATA F. Molti, Sani e
Forti. L’Eugenetica in Italia. Torino, Bollati Boringhieri. 2006; CICERI M., Origini Controllate. La prima Eugenetica Italiana 1900-1924. Civitavecchia,
Prospettiva Editrice, 2009; EKBERG M., The Old Eugenics and the New
Genetics Compared. Social History of Medicine 2007; 20: 581-593;
MAC-CABELLI T., Nascere Diseguali: Considerazioni su Eugenetica ed
Eredita-rismo in Italia. Società e Storia 2009; 123: 113-137; MONARI D., Il Miglio-ramento della Razza e il Fascismo. Gerarchia 1922; 10: 592-596.
20. GALTON F., Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London, Macmillan. 1883, p. 25.
21. GALTON F., Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims. The American Journal of Sociology 1904; 10: 1-25, p. 1.
22. GALTON F., Restrictions in Marriage. In: AA.VV., Sociological Papers. London, MacMillan and Co, 1906, Vol. 2, p. 3.
23. GALTON F., Addresses on Eugenics. Westminster Gazette, 26 June 1908, first page. Regarding the three aforementioned definitions of eugenics by Gal-ton, the interested reader should also consider MACCABELLI T., Nascere
Diseguali: Considerazioni su Eugenetica ed Ereditarismo in Italia. Società e
Storia 2009; 123:113-137, p. 117. 24. CASSATA F., see note 13, p. 12.
25. PEARSON K., The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1914, p. 348. See also GALTON F., note 23, second page.
26. GALTON F., see note 23, second page. 27. GALTON F., see note 21, p. 5. 28. GALTON F., see note 21, p. 5.
29. GALTON F., Essays in Eugenics. London, The Eugenics Education Society, 1909, p. 24.
30. PROCTOR R. N., The Destruction of “Lives Not Worth Living.’ In: TERRY J., URLA J., Deviant Bodies. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana Univer-sity Press, 1995, p. 170. MACCABELLI T., see n. 23, pp. 117-118.
31. CASSATA F., see note 13, p. 9. See also CASSATA F., An Unknown History:
Eugenics in Italy. Medicina e Storia 2005, 9: 133-141; QUINE M. S., From Malthus to Mussolini: The Italian Eugenics Movement and Fascist Popula-tion Policy, 1890-1938 (unpublished PhD thesis). London, University
Col-lege London, 1990; QUINE M. S., The First-Wave Eugenic Revolution in
Southern Europe: Science sans Frontières. In: BASHFORD A., LEVINE P., The Oxford Handbook of The History of Eugenics. Oxford, Oxford
Univer-sity Press, 2010, pp. 377-397. 32. CASSATA F., see note 13, p. 9.
33. See for example Il Pensiero Sanitario, Difesa Sociale, Giornale di Medicina Militare, Rivista Italiana di Sociologia, Critica Medico-Sociale and other journals that delved into eugenic issues after 1912.
34. MAZZARELLO P., Cesare Lombroso: an Anthropologist between
Evo-lution and Degeneration. Functional Neurology 2011; 26: 97-101, p. 97;
MAZZARELLO P., Il Genio e l’Alienista. La Visita di Lombroso a
Tol-stoj. Napoli, Bibliopolis, 1998; see also GATTI U., VERDE A., Cesare Lombroso: Methodological Ambiguities and Brilliant Intuitions.
Interna-tional Journal of Law and Psychiatry 2012; 35: 19-16; KUSHNER H. I.,
of Left-Handedness. Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and
Cogni-tion 2013; 18: 416-436; MONTALDO S., Cesare Lombroso. Gli
Scien-ziati e la Nuova Italia. Bologna, Il Mulino. 2011; MUSUMECI E., Cesare Lombroso e le Neuroscienze: un Parricidio Mancato. Devianza, Libero Arbitrio, Imputabilità tra Antiche Chimere ed Inediti Scenari. Milano,
Franco Angeli. 2012.
35. MAZZARELLO P., Cesare Lombroso. See note 34, p. 98.
36. LOMBROSO C., LOMBROSO-FERRERO G., Criminal Man. According to
the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York & London, G. P. Putnam’s
Sons (The Knickerbocker Press) 1911, XIV.
37. LOMBROSO C., LOMBROSO-FERRERO G., see note 36, p. XIV. 38. LOMBROSO C., LOMBROSO-FERRERO G., see note 36, p. XIV. 39. MAZZARELLO P., see note 34, p. 97.
40. LOMBROSO C., LOMBROSO-FERRERO G., see note 36, p. 136. 41. LOMBROSO C., LOMBROSO-FERRERO G., see note 36, p. 284.
42. LOMBROSO C., LOMBROSO-FERRERO G., see note 36, p. 287, Appendix. 43. GALTON F., Hereditary Genius. London, Macmillan, 1892 (Second Edition),
p. IX.
44. GALTON F., see note 43, p. IX.
45. URLA J., TERRY J., Introduction: Mapping Embodied Deviance. In: TERRY J., URLA J., Deviant Bodies. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 1; BERTANI S., Cesare Lombroso: il Misoneismo e il
Mar-tirio del Folle. Memorandum 2007; 12: 29-45, p. 30. The interested reader
should also consider FRIGESSI D., Cesare Lombroso. Torino, Einaudi, 2003, particularly p. 137 and the book edited by FRIGESSI D., GIACANELLI F., MANGONI L., Containing selected works by Lombroso. LOMBROSO C.,
Delitto, Genio, Follia. Scritti Scelti. Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2000.
46. HOLLADAY CLAGHORN K., Review of Corrado Gini’s. I Fattori
Demo-grafici dell’Evoluzione delle Nazioni. The American Economic Review 1913;
4: 959-961, p. 959. A general framework on the figure of Corrado Gini is provided by BENEDETTI C., On the One-Hundredth Anniversary of the
Birth of Corrado Gini. Metron 1984; 42: 3-19; BENEDETTI C., Ricordando Corrado Gini. Rivista di Politica Economica 1965; 54, 3-9; BOLDRINI M., Corrado Gini. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 1966; 129: 148-150;
FEDERICI N., L’opera di Corrado Gini nell’Ambito della Demografia e delle
Scienze Sociali. Genus 1966; 22: 7-41; SALVEMINI T., Corrado Gini. In:
SILLS D. L., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York, Macmillan, 1968. The interested reader should also consider BERTAUX S.,
Démographie, Statistique et Fascisme: Corrado Gini et l’Istat, Entrescience et Idéologie (1926-1932). Roma moderna e Contemporanea 1999; 7:
571-598; CASSATA F., Il Fascismo Razionale. Corrado Gini fra Scienza e
Poli-tica. Roma, Carocci. 2006; FAVERO G., Corrado Gini and Italian Statistics Under Fascism (unpublished paper). Venezia, Università Ca’ Foscari di
Vene-zia, 2002; GIORGI G. M., Corrado Gini: the Man and the Scientist. Metron 2011; 69: 1-28; MONTANARI A., MONARI P., Gini’s Ideas: New
Perspec-tives for Modern Multivariate Statistical Analysis. Statistica 2008; 68:
239-254; PARISI D., Corrado Gini (1884-1965): The Leading Figure of the Italian
Group in the Econometric Society. History of Political Economy 2011; 43:
211-232; RITZER G., The Gini Coefficient. In: RITYER G., RYAN J. M., The
Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology. Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
47. HOLLADAY CLAGHORN, see note 46, p. 959.
48. See also SERGI G., La Decadenza delle Nazioni Latine. Torino, Bocca, 1900; SERGI G., La Stratificazione del Carattere e la Delinquenza. Milano, Dumo-lard, 1883; SERGI G., Le Degenerazioni Umane. Milano, DumoDumo-lard, 1889; TEDESCO L., “For a Healthy, Peace-Loving, and Hardworking Race”:
Anthropology and Eugenics in the Writings of Giuseppe Sergi. Modern Italy
2011; 1: 51-65.
49. GINI C., Il Sesso dal Punto di Vista Statistico: le Leggi della Produzione dei
Sessi. Milano, Palermo, Napoli, Remo Sandron Editore, 1908, pp. 458-59.
Gini wrote most of his papers in Italian. To read an English translation of some of his ideas, please consider the book by CASSATA F., listed in note 13, whose author is credited with these translations.
50. GINI C., see note 49, p. 454.
51. GINI C., Il Diverso Accrescimento delle Classi Sociali e la Concentrazione
della Ricchezza. Giornale degli Economisti 1909; 38: 27-83, p. 33.
52. GINI C., see note 51, p. 37.
53. See for example MORTARA G., La Salute Pubblica in Italia durante e dopo
la Guerra. Bari, Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 1925.
54. GINI C., see note 51, p. 35.
55. GINI C., Contributi Statistici ai Problemi dell’Eugenica. Rivista Italiana di Sociologia 1912; 16: 317-426, p. 320. MACCABELLI T., see n. 23, p. 126. 56. GINI C., see note 51, p. 35.
57. GINI C., L’Uomo Medio. Giornale degli Economisti e Rivista di Statistica 1914; 48: 1-24, p. 10.
58. MAIOCCHI R., see note 2, p. 90. 59. CASSATA F., see note 13, p. 37.
60. GINI C., see note 55, p. 383.
61. CASSATA F., see note 13, p. 36. See also GINI C., GALVANI L., Tavole di
Mor-talità della Popolazione Italiana. Roma, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato. 1931;
IPSEN C., Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; TEITELBAUM M., WINTER J. M., The Fear of Population Decline. New York, Academic Press, 1985. 62. GINI C., I Fattori Demografici dell’Evoluzione delle Nazioni. Torino, Bocca,
1912, p. 107.
63. GINI C., see note 62, p. 107. 64. GINI C., see note 62, p. 105. 65. GINI C., see note 55, p. 370. 66. MAIOCCHI R., see note 2, p. 85. 67. GINI C., see note 55, p. 370.
68. MAIOCCHI R., see note 2, pp. 12-13.
69. SAVORGNAN F., La Guerra e la Popolazione. Studi di Demografia. Bolo-gna, Zanichelli. 1918, p, 93. See also SAVORGNAN F., Demografia di
Guerra e altri Saggi. Bologna, Zanichelli, 1921.
70. CASSATA F., see note 13, p. 69. On demography and eugenics in the interwar period, please consider RAMSDEN E., Carving up Population Science:
Eugenics, Demography and. the Controversy over the “Biological Law” of Population Growth. Social Studies of Science 2002, 32: 857-899.
71. GENTILE G., see note 10, p. 25. 72. GENTILE G., see note 10, p. 25.
73. CASTELLANO V., Corrado Gini: A Memoir. Metron 1965; 24: 3-84; GIORGI G. M., Corrado Gini. In: Il Contributo Italiano alla Storia del Pen-siero. Roma, Economia, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, pp. 620-626. 74. A good reference on this subject is GREGOR A. J., Mussolini’s
Intellec-tuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought. Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 2006; see also ISNENGHI M., Intellettuali Militanti e Intellettuali
Funzionari: Appunti sulla Cultura Fascista. Torino, Einaudi, 1979;
MAIOC-CHI R., see note 2, and MAIOCMAIOC-CHI R., Gli Scienziati del Duce. Roma, Carocci, 2004. For a focus on the Manifesto degli Intellettuali Antifascisti the reader should consider the old but still very fresh book by PAPA E. R., Storia
di Due Manifesti: il Fascismo e la Cultura Italiana. Milano, Feltrinelli, 1958.
75. FISHER R. A., On the Probable Error of a Coefficient of Correlation
Dedu-ced from a Small Sample. Metron 1921; 1: 3-32.
76. GINI C., The Scientific Basis of Fascism. Political Science Quarterly 1927; 1: 99-115.
